Carol McKinney Highsmith (born Carol Louise McKinney on May 18, 1946) is an American photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed in all the states of the United States, as well as the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. She photographs the entire American vista (including landscapes, architecture, urban and rural life, and people in their work environments) in all fifty U.S. states as a record of the early 21st century.

Highsmith is donating her life’s work of more than 100,000 images, royalty-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare, one-person archive.

In 1976, Highsmith moved to Washington, D.C., and spent six years as a senior account executive for radio station WMAL while taking classes at American University. She served on boards of directors including that of the Greater Washington Board of Trade.

By 1979, Highsmith won a national contest initiated by the Radio Advertising Bureau in New York for the nation’s most unusual sales effort. This stemmed from broadcasts from London and the Oktoberfest in Germany that she had devised and organized. She traveled with the broadcast team on both trips. ABC ran a full-page ad in The New York Times promoting one of the broadcasts from London.